A Strange New Theory of How Space-Time is Emerging

9/09/2014

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"A metaphorical chip holding all the
programming for our universe stores information like a quantum computer."
This is the radical insight to the foundation of our Universe developed by Mark
Van Raamsdonk, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of British
Columbia, that says that the world we see around us is a projection from a set
of rules written in simpler, lower-dimensional physics—just as the 2D code in a
computer’s memory chip creates an entire virtual 3D world. "What Mark has
done is put his finger on a key ingredient of how space-time is emerging:
entanglement," says Gary Horowitz, who studies quantum gravity at the
University of California Santa Barbara. Horowitz says this idea has changed how
people think about quantum gravity, though it hasn’t yet been universally
accepted. "You don’t come across this idea by following other ideas. It
requires a strange insight," Horowitz adds. "He is one of the stars
of the younger generation."

"We’re trying to construct a dictionary,"
says Van Raamsdonk, that allows physicists to translate descriptions of our
complex universe into simpler terms. If they succeed, they will have found the
biggest jigsaw piece in the puzzle of a Grand Unified Theory—something that can
describe all of the forces of our universe, at all scales from the atomic to
the galactic. That puzzle piece is, specifically, something that can describe
gravity within the framework of quantum mechanics, which governs physics on
small scales. Such a unified theory is needed to explain the extreme scenarios
of a black hole or the first moments of the universe."

The catacylst for
Van Raamsdonk's theory was a 1998 paper by Juan Maldacena a theoretical
astrophysicist at Princeton's Institite for Advanced studies that proposed that
to understand quantum gravity through string theory, you can look instead to
the much more ordinary, well-described system of quantum mechanics called
quantum field theory that concluded that it seems that all the information
about our complex multi-dimensional world can be described using a simpler,
lower-dimensional language—just as a 3D image is projected from the 2D screen
of a hologram, or a 3D computer gaming world created from a 2D memory chip.

"After that, people wrote thousands of papers just testing whether that
could be true," says Van Raamsdonk. "No one has actually proven it,
but we’re as certain about it as about anything in physics," he added.